Favorite/Best Movies of the 2010 Decade

I like the movie. Looking forward to picking up the Criterion.

Just watched this last week. That movie is fucking wild. They did a really good job laying out and revealing the twists along the way. Great pick.

The Handmaiden rules. Everything Drac says is on point and that the movie is also relentlessly entertaining is the cherry on top. Love it.

23. The Social Network (2010)


Year: 2010
Release Date: 10/1/2010
Director: David Fincher
Writer(s): Aaron Sorkin
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Rashida Jones, Max Minghella, and Rooney Mara
Based on: The book "The Accidental Billionaires" by Ben Mezrich
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 120 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

2010’s The Social Network is a movie that has in some ways aged beautifully and in other ways seems rather dated already. To be sure the public’s relationship with Facebook has gone in all sorts of directions since the film came out which couldn’t possibly have been predicted and in that sense the film may prove to be an odd one to watch for future generations who may not quite understand what life was like before social media and also what life was like when social media still seemed kind of frivolous. The film is in fact a rather unflattering look at the origins of Facebook but Mark Zuckerberg’s shortcomings are rather personal and limited to the well-being of the people around him rather than society. Still, the film’s cultural relevance shouldn’t be diminished too much because even if it didn’t quite predict what influence Facebook would have on society it did still manage to understand that there was something of a clash of worlds coming between the world of Silicon Valley and the legacy economy and some of the swagger that would characterize bit tech.

On more of a filmmaking level, this certainly felt like something of a natural evolution of David Fincher’s filmmaking after he went digital with 2007’s Zodiac but in retrospect it could be said to have sort of set the template for what his filmmaking would be like for the rest of the decade, perhaps because it was his first collaboration with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and perhaps because it was in some ways his first truly successful forays into “respectable” subject matter. Granted he would go right back to making movies about serial killers soon after, perhaps because he realized he no longer had anything to prove, but the fact that he was able to bring to life a screenplay by eternal optimist Aaron Sorkin was certainly noteworthy. On top of all that the movie was rather uncanny in its ability to highlight new acting talent. Jesse Eisenberg was already established when the film was made and was something of an obvious casting choice but Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, and Rooney Mara were all nobodies before this movie and would go on to be some of the decade’s most successful young actors, and the Justin Timberlake stunt casting worked out kind of perfectly. Really the whole movie is something of a divine mix of flavors that work together surprisingly well and after ten years it has proven to be ever watchable and intriguing.

Social Network is fucking great.

Wow, I forgot to post one of these this morning, I'll do three in one day sometime over the weekend to make up for it.

22. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)



Year: 2013
Release Date: 12/25/2013
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer(s): Terence Winter
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Favreau, and Jean Dujardin
Based on: The memoirs "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "Catching the Wolf of Wall Street" by Jordan Belfort
Distributor: Paramount
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 180 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

In the 90s Martin Scorsese made a pair of gangster movies that have long been linked: Goodfellas and Casino. Both had the same pair of stars, both were based on true crime biographies of former gangsters, and both employed similar voice-over narrations but if you look closely at both that are in fact making two connected but separate statements about the state of organized crime. Goodfellas is about how organized crime lost its place in American society and Casino is about what they were replaced by: corporate America. About twenty years later Scorsese decided to revisit that “rise and fall” Goodfellas format to look in on what the inheritors of American criminal ingenuity have been doing with the place and the portrait he paints isn’t very pretty. At the center of the film is Jordan Belfort, a real life gangster who differs from Henry Hill and Sam Rothstein in that he isn’t a killer, but aside from that his criminality is far more obscene than anything that Scorsese’s previous gangsters could have dreamed of. Henry Hill may have been a cocaine addict (much to the disapproval of his superiors) but here Jordan Belfort engages in decadence of type that would make a Roman emperor blush, and Sam Rothstein may have overseen outlandish amounts of money but compared to Belfort’s ill-gotten gains he was a relative pauper. The question that the film asks without asking is if the audience thinks this is better or worse than the more conventional gangster stories he’s given us before. It’s not entirely clear where Scorsese falls on that question, but there is certainly a statement to be found in the fact that while Belfort does “fall” by the end of the film he doesn’t really fall as far as the gangsters in his previous films. Why would he? He’s not the last of a dying breed, in many ways he’s very much a made of the present.

Define "funny."

21. 12 Years a Slave (2013)

Year: 2013
Release Date: 11/8/2013
Director: Steve McQueen
Writer(s): John Ridley
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong'o, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Sarah Paulson, Brad Pitt, and Alfre Woodard
Based on: The book "Twelve Years a Slave" by Solomon Northup
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Country of Origin: United States
Language: English
Running Time: 134 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

Every once in a while I’ll hear people say something like “there are too many movies about slavery,” which always baffles me because from where I sit there are hardly any films about slavery at all. In the twenty five years leading up to 12 Years a Slave American chattle slavery had only really been depicted in a select few Hollywood films in any kind of detail like Glory, Amistad, Beloved, and Django Unchained which would seem like a rather scant output given the institution’s extreme cruelty and incredible importance to American History. With 12 Years a Slave we were finally given a sort of Schindler’s List of slavery and we got it from Steve McQueen, the incredible emerging director who previously gave us Shame and Hunger. Like those movies this featured a notable performance from Michael Fassbender as a cruel slave owner but this was the first time that McQueen (a black British man) sought to tackle issues of race directly in a film. McQueeen was in full command of the medium from a technical perspective when he made the film and made a style of contrasting the harsh brutality of slavery with the pastoral beauty of the various delta plantations. He also managed to assemble a pretty impressive cast and while a couple of the celebrities he put into bit parts were a tad distracting he more than made up for it by more or less discovering Lupita Nyong'o and having her come out the gate with an ferocious Academy Award winning performance like this is very impressive. Beyond that there’s a pretty clear wisdom in the way McQueen presents slavery in the film; he shows different strains of slave ownership (be it “enlightened,” overtly cruel, male, female, transactional, personal) and shows why they’re equally culpable in the greatest crime in American, if not world, history.